On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 18:52:31 -0400, Barry <wassercrats@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know enough about anti-aliasing to know how aggressive the
> anti-aliasing would need to be before an entire top border would be an
> extra pixel thick. I'm just raising this issue incase it really could be
> an issue.
>
A straight vertical or horizontal line canNOT produce extra pixels if they
are not positioned with a sub-pixel accurate method or given sub-pixel
accurate widths. The 'aggressiveness' of anti-aliasing is a non-issue. The
accuracy of AA is something else, and there are many many methods for AA
that produces different results in terms of clarity and accuracy. A
sub-pixel positoned horizontal vertical border would be an extra-pixel
wide "almost immediately" (with little sampling amounts) with any sane AA
method! Also as David Woolley explained, functions be implemented that can
produce infinitely accurate AA in a single pass. So that sould be called
'aggresive' because it is infinitely accurate, but did it not work 'less'
to produce a more accurate result?? There are also methods for sampling
like super-sampling and multi-sampling. And multi-sampling has different
methods for their sampling locations (straight grid vs rotated grid) which
all have small differences in output. Should CSS worry about that too??
So in conclusion: If you define things in sub-pixel accuracy, and you know
the user-agent has that support, don't worry, leave it to the user-agent.
We already have the power to define things in mm instead of px, so maybe
in future there maybe user agents with totally anti-aliased ultra-slick
look. And that will be EXACTLY the time when you won't have to worry about
how many pixels a border is, but how many milimeters a border is, which is
also the user-agents problem! But as long as you are designing in px, and
that there aren't vector only browsers, you should not worry about a thing
for vertical and horizontal straight lines being anti-aliased or not.
Whether the 'corners' will be anti-aliased should be left to the user
agent. And I bet I'll like the one with a proper-anti-alias.
--
Emrah BASKAYA
www.hesido.com